The Orlando Magic is central Florida's pro basketball team, drawing up to 17,000 fans for home games. Since joining the National Basketball League in the 1989-1990 season, the "Magic" has proven itself a serious contender and one of the NBA's most popular teams. With the help of several star players over the years, like Shaquille O'Neal and Grant Hill, the team has advanced to the NBA Playoffs seven times, including the past two years consecutively. Apart from games, the Orlando Magic gives back to the community and its loyal fans through player appearances, community partnerships, donated items, mascot and talent appearances, and service projects. Last year alone, Magic community relations reached more than 75,000 youth.
As far as customers go, professional sports fans are probably among the most loyal and vocal. To enhance the game experience and keep fans coming back, several NBA teams have created Fan Relations departments to respond to fan complaints and proactively create programs for better game experiences. Orlando Magic is one of only six NBA teams with a designated Fan Relations department. The department must keep track of specific fan complaints on issues ranging from cleanliness of the bathrooms to post-game traffic, and then create reports and initiatives in response.
Fan Relations at Orlando Magic previously used basic word processing and spreadsheet programs. With a manual process, looking up details about specific fans and incidents required scouring pages of documents, while linking multiple issues to one fan was impossible. Likewise, creating reports, which are essential for seeing trends in complaints and fan issues, also required that the department manually piece together information into an organized format. To keep fans coming back for more Magic action, Fan Relations needed a powerful contact and project management system with simplified reporting capabilities.